LESSONS STILL UNLEARNED

AbstractIn this essay, I contend that the elevation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the evisceration of civil rights it has enabled, should be understood in part to reflect a tragic mistake on the part of Black America writ large. I will argue it represents the absence of a fully embodied vision of racial justice—one that genuinely symbolizes the entire panoply of concerns that must be addressed if the quest for racial equality is to ever be fully realized in the United States. Importantly, what this essay will point to is a political and discursive failure to center the concerns of Black females at the heart of our racial justice agenda.

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To Sit or Not to Sit: The Supreme Court of the United States and the Civil Rights Movement in the Upper South

Journal of Supreme Court History ◽

10.1111/j.1059-4329.2004.00078.x ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 29 (2) ◽

pp. 145-162 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Peter Wallenstein

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

The United States ◽

The Supreme Court ◽

Upper South

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Obstacles to Equality: Government Responses to the Gay Rights Movement in the United States

Political Studies ◽

10.1111/j.1467-9248.1982.tb00519.x ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 59-76 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

A. S. Cohan

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Social Movements ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Minority Groups ◽

Gay Rights ◽

The United States ◽

American Government ◽

The Supreme Court ◽

Gay Rights Movement

The Gay Rights movement in the United States, like other social movements, may achieve its goal of full equality before the law through actions by the legislatures or courts. Generally, action by the latter opens the door to concessions by the former. But the Gay Rights movement has not progressed as its adherents have wished for four reasons: (1) the unpopularity of homosexuals; (2) the disjointed nature of American government(s); (3) the absence of cohesiveness of the movement itself, possibly as a result of a lack of economic deprivation among homosexuals; and (4) most significant, the unwillingness of the Supreme Court to accord to homosexuals the same rights it has extended to other minority groups, thereby giving a lead to legislatures as they did in the area of civil rights for Blacks.

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Forward—Police Misconduct and Kibbe v. City of Springfield

10.31228/osf.io/eqzrw ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Harris Freeman

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Police Officer ◽

United States Supreme Court ◽

The United States ◽

Police Misconduct ◽

United States Supreme ◽

Racial Justice ◽

The Law

Published: Harris Freeman, Forward—Police Misconduct and Kibbe v. City of Springfield, 40 W. NEW ENG. L. REV. 393 (2018). The Law Review’s 2017 symposium, “Perspectives on Racial Justice in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter,” appropriately opened with a panel that addressed the ongoing challenge of combatting police misconduct, as seen through the lens of Kibbe v. City of Springfield, a civil rights case that unfolded in Western Massachusetts and reached the United States Supreme Court thirty years ago. Kibbe presented the Court with the question of what the proper standard of liability should be for a municipality accused of a civil rights violation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for inadequately training a police officer who violates a person’s civil rights.

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